Review
Title: Rainbow Letters: The Temerity to Believe
Author: Gary Watts, MD
Genre: Essay Collection
Year Published: 2022
Price: $16.99
Binding
Number of Pages: 313
ISBN: 979-8449218995
Reviewed for Association for Mormon Letters by Monya Baker
Twenty-five years ago, the Episcopal Church apologized to its gay members for “years of rejection and maltreatment.” The book Rainbow Letters: The Temerity to Believe by Gary Watts makes me imagine a better world, one where the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints had served as this sort of example and led the way in acceptance rather than continuing to lag.
After Watt’s son Craig was excommunicated in 1992, they spent hours on the phone in tears. Craig had completed a two-year mission and was serving in several callings. He’d told his bishop he was gay and thought the conversation had gone well, but what he’d thought was a casual follow-up meeting turned out to be something much more hostile, a church court that stripped Craig of his membership. “Don’t let this happen to anyone else,” he asked his parents. It was an impossible request, one that they devoted their lives to.
Soon after Craig’s excommunication, Watts, a radiologist, and his wife Millie, a homemaker, became chairs of Family Fellowship, a support group for Church members learning to embrace their gay children. Watts began writing General Authorities, several of whom he knew personally, advocating that the Church support gay romantic relationships and civil rights.
Rainbow Letters: the Temerity to Believe collects nearly three decades worth of these letters, along with his and allies’ op-ed pieces, speeches, and other correspondence. Though necessarily repetitive, they offer an important archive. These writings are fierce, relentless, and exemplify the best of Mormon values.
Watts uses logic, doctrine, science, and many personal accounts to argue that the Church’s LGBTQ policies wound individuals, their families, and the Church itself. “The very fact that General Authorities have spent ‘considerable time, effort and prayer on this policy’ stands as prima facie evidence that the policy is not working well,” he writes to Jeffrey Holland in 2021, after Holland’s ‘musket-fire’ talk accused queer-accepting Saints of disloyalty to the Church. “When was the last time you and the brethren shed tears and spent time discussing the Golden Rule?”
Watts’s letters are full of pleas for compassion, or at least recognition of the pain that Church doctrine is causing, sacrificing and traumatizing families with gay members. “Not one of you has come to ask us what our experience has been. Why?” he writes in one letter. In another, “It is hard for me to imagine such “anti-family” advice from a “pro-family” church.” And, “If there is another church policy that produces even one-tenth of this much “bitter fruit” I am unaware of it.” He asks whether church leaders are more concerned about public relations than about families looking for a Christian response for their gay sons and daughters.
In 1995, in a long editorial in the Daily Universe (BYU’s student newspaper), Watts argues that the Church’s efforts against legally recognizing same-sex relationships is inappropriate and testified these are based on genuine love. A graduate student in a counseling program soon responds that pedophiles and rapists are also following genuine feelings. Like them, homosexuals must learn to heed social norms, he writes. The counsel of living prophets, he continues, is all he needs to know about the matter.
That graduate student was David Matheson, who went on to build up LDS reparative therapy programs Evergreen International and Journey Into Manhood, which had General Authorities on their boards and advertised themselves as helping homosexuals redirect (or at least manage) their feelings via clothed same-sex cuddle parties and coaching to lower their voices and ‘act manly.’ At their families’ urging and expense, vulnerable people were taught they were an affront to God.
In 2019, Matheson apologized for this work, divorced his wife of 34 years, and began dating men. One wonders how much happier he and others could have been if the living prophets he’d followed so resolutely had been more informed and compassionate.
Watts is both poignant and sly as he tries to change minds. When a local politician argues against allowing gay-straight alliances in public schools with claims that his brother and twenty other youngsters were coerced and converted into a homosexual lifestyle by an abusive scoutmaster, Watts pledges $10,000 to anyone who can substantiate the claim. The story crumbles.
An expression of disappointment is the Mormon version of fire and brimstone, and Watts does not hold back from telling General Authorities their policies and speeches disappoint. He points out that the Church righted itself in lifting the unjust ban against Black members holding the Priesthood and urges Holland to consider the chance he has to help the Church. “Wouldn’t you rather ‘be the change’ than try to defend a policy that is antiquated and headed for the dustbin of history?”
Watts refutes church brochures and speeches that suggest sexuality is chosen and changeable by citing the accumulating scientific evidence (and is called a mud-slinging activist for undermining others’ hopes). He offers his own experience as evidence as well. He declares repeatedly that his son Craig and daughter Lori (who came out a few years after her older brother) are just as exemplary individuals and just as worthy of loving relationships as their four straight siblings, and that attending church has become intolerable for even the straight members of the family, who do not accept their gay members as part of a great evil. (The Watts family is exceptional here: the letters are filled with more painful accounts of familial rejection, including families who refuse to learn anything about LGBTQ issues unless it comes directly from a Church source.)
One of the most moving moments for me came when Watts resigns his membership after Church leaders demand that members donate money and time to defeating gay marriage rights in a California election. I also left the Church in part because I believe it is morally wrong on this issue. But unlike me, Watts tried for years to comfort those within the Church and to change it from within. His relinquishing this identity feels harrowing.
Near the book’s close, Watts includes talks by several Mormon parents who learned to embrace their family members for who they are. James Jamieson speaks for many. “I have stopped trying to fix my gay sons. Rather it is I that am fixed.”
Watts is still waiting and working, for a church that can say the same.